In our October 2026 searches, Liquid Death turned up in 93 public Instagram posts and Alani Nu in 66. That gives Liquid Death 58% of the posts we found for the pair. Counting only posts that tagged each brand's account, our October beverage report has 39 against 28, which is 58% again. Neither count is every post on Instagram; both are samples taken the same way for the two brands, which is why the share holds (how we count). Two methods, one answer: that is what a usable competitor comparison looks like, and it is what most monitoring advice never gets to.
A founder asked r/Entrepreneur how people monitor brand and competitor mentions, and whether it is worth it. The replies were mostly tool names. Good tools, but a list of tools is not a method, and nobody said how to watch a competitor, what to do with a mention once you have it, or what any of it costs. This is the longer answer, written for consumer, CPG and D2C brands.
Is brand monitoring worth it? The short answer
Yes, on two conditions. People have to be posting about your category in public, which for consumer brands they are, mostly on Instagram and TikTok. And someone has to do something with what turns up, every week. A feed nobody reads is a cost with no return.
It is not worth paying for if you are named a few times a month. In October 2026, 55 of the 109 beverage brands we track were not tagged in a single Instagram post we found. A brand in that position should check by hand once a month and spend the rest of the time giving people a reason to post. The monitoring becomes worth automating when there is more than you can read.
A free brand monitoring stack
Before buying anything, run this for a month. It covers one brand and two competitors in about thirty minutes a week.
Instagram, the Tagged tab and notifications. Yours shows posts that tagged you. A competitor's is public too, and you can read it without them knowing.
Instagram, hashtag and caption search. Search each brand's name, its hashtag and its common misspellings. This is where untagged posts are, and there are many: of the 93 October posts naming Liquid Death that we found, 40 tagged @liquiddeath. For Bob's Red Mill it was 1 of 10. The full routine is in finding posts that mention you without tagging you.
TikTok search. Same terms. Sort by recent if the app offers it, and note the views on anything that names a brand.
Reddit search and a free Reddit alert. Search each name sorted by new. A thread asking for a recommendation in your category is worth more than one that merely names you.
A news alert. Each brand in quotation marks, with exclusion words if the name is shared with something else. Of 15 articles naming Celsius published between 23 and 29 October, one was about a bitcoin miner.
Paid brand monitoring tools, by what you need
Choose by where your customers talk, then by budget. Prices below are the vendors' own, read off their pricing pages in November 2026; each comparison page has the plan detail and the date.
| If you need | Consider | Price, November 2026 | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free start, web and news | Google Alerts | Free | News and blogs only. No Instagram or TikTok captions. |
| Free start, Reddit | F5Bot | Free, paid plans at $12.99 and $49.99 a month | Reddit and Hacker News alerts. Good for one job. |
| Web alerts with spam filtering | Alertmouse | Free for one alert, $10 to $100 a month billed annually | The open web, press and forums, with noise filtered out. Built around web pages. |
| Every channel, one feed | Brand24 | $199 to $699 a month on listed plans | Widest source list here, priced by keywords and mention volume. |
| Every channel, smaller budget | Mentionlytics | $49 to $624 a month billed yearly | Keyword rules and a monthly mention allowance. |
| A team that publishes and replies all day | Sprout Social | Hundreds a month | Listening sits beside scheduling and an inbox. |
| Instagram and TikTok first, with competitors | Monitor Mentions | Free for one brand, paid plans on the pricing page | Posts that name a brand, tagged or not, benchmarked against competitors. |
Where each one is the better pick. Brand24 reads more kinds of source than anything else here, podcasts and newsletters included, so a brand whose story lives in the press should start there. Sprout Social is the right buy for a team that already schedules and answers on social all day, because listening is one tab of a tool they would use anyway. Google Alerts is the right buy for a brand with no budget and a name nobody else uses. We are the pick for a consumer brand whose customers post on Instagram and TikTok and which wants competitors counted the same way. The longer ranking is in our guide to brand monitoring tools.
One more category is new: what AI assistants say when a shopper asks them for a brand. You can check it by hand. On 1 November 2026, ChatGPT and Gemini both named King Arthur Baking first and Bob's Red Mill second for the best baking brands; the baking answers are public, as are those for every other category we track.
What to track for competitors
Share of voice. Your mentions divided by yours plus theirs, counted the same way for both (the share of voice entry has the arithmetic). Liquid Death against Alani Nu in October came out at 58% either way it was counted, which is the check worth running: if two counting methods disagree, the gap is in the method.
The platform split. Bob's Red Mill and King Arthur Baking turned up in 10 Instagram posts each in our October searches. On TikTok, in videos posted from 25 to 31 October, we found King Arthur Baking more than three times as often, 23 videos with 280,894 views between them, against Bob's Red Mill's 7 with 17,019. Level on one platform, far apart on the other. Monitor only Instagram and you would never know.
Creators. Who posts about them and not about you. In the October report, the tagged posts we found came from 205 accounts, and 19 of them posted more than once. One of them tagged Alani Nu, Black Rifle Coffee, Celsius and Liquid Death across four posts. A creator who already posts about your competitor is a creator who posts about your category.
Spikes, and what they were made of. We found eleven Liquid Death posts on 27 October, more than three times its October average of three a day, and most of them were about two collaborations, one with Pop-Tarts. Celsius went from 1 tagged post found in September to 15 in October. Poppi went from 13 to 4. A spike tells you to look; the posts tell you why.
Tone. Read it post by post. Our labels for Liquid Death's October posts were 20 positive, 18 neutral and 1 critical; Alani Nu's were 33, 30 and 1. Both brands are liked by the people who post about them, which means tone is not where either one will find an edge.
The news. Ten of the 15 Celsius articles in that late-October week were about lawsuits, in the same fortnight its Instagram posts were climbing. A competitor's bad week in the press is worth knowing about, and worth staying quiet about.
The quiet way to watch all of this is in how to see who is posting about your competitor.
What to do with what you find
Reply to posts about you, from the brand account, in public, once. Repost the good ones, after asking. Write to creators who posted twice without being asked; they are your seeding list. Fix what keeps coming up, such as a lid that leaks or a store that is always out, and tell the people who raised it. Ask for a link when a blog or news article names you without one. Send product the complaints and the surprising uses, unedited.
On a competitor's posts, do none of the above. Replying with your own product under someone else's post is how a brand account turns into a spam account. Use competitor mentions for decisions, not for comments.
A 30-minute brand and competitor monitoring setup
- Write down every name for your brand and two competitors: brand, handle, hashtag, misspellings, product names. (5 minutes)
- Create a news alert for each name in quotation marks, with exclusion words where needed. (5 minutes)
- Set a Reddit alert for each name and bookmark the two subreddits where your category is discussed. (5 minutes)
- Open a sheet with seven columns: date, brand, platform, account, tagged or not, what it said, what you did. (3 minutes)
- Run the first pass: each Tagged tab, a hashtag and caption search per name, a TikTok search per name. Log everything. (10 minutes)
- Put a recurring thirty minutes in the calendar on the same day each week, and count the month at the end of it. (2 minutes)
If the weekly pass starts taking longer than thirty minutes, that is the point to automate it. Add your brand on the Monitor Mentions dashboard: type your website, confirm its Instagram account, and the posts naming it are collected, tagged or not. One brand is free on a weekly collection. Competitors, TikTok and news are on the paid plans, set out on the pricing page. And if the answer to the Reddit question for you is a different tool, that is a fine answer too; the method above works with any of them.